Fiercely embattled with itself, Joker: Folie à Deux is contrarian filmmaking at its core, and in its most gruesome joke of all, makes a mockery of its own existence. Self sabotage is rare at this level, but Todd Philips so wants to be the enfant terrible of comic book films that he’s now directing a half musical, half self-implosion as though held at gunpoint. The very existence of Folie à Deux feels loaded with tension and ready to disintegrate into…

Cultivates a quiet beauty out of the kind of pain that goes unspoken. A Real Pain is about that deeply ingrained generational pain. That pain where only your family knows how you really hold it. Pain that is held way below the surface, in that everything we do, every way we operate is a projection so as not to surface it.

Jesse Eisenberg operates as a director from a place of patient understanding. The complex familial relationship between his character…

Sean Baker has become an expert at locating his movies. Locality personalizes a movie, sets it somewhere that feels like a place, projects the dimensions of the setting to the audience, saying places matter and are characters too. The American spaces Sean Baker’s cinema inhabits are specific, sensory, use color precisely, and are worlds unto themselves. We feel like we have visited a place after we have seen a Sean Baker movie — as he captures the soul and interiority…

It’s too rare that the feeling of pure joy and excitement washes over us watching cinema. Movies capable of providing that are rare. The Substance gave me this feeling constantly, just a dopamine filled whole body response to the movie’s sense for body horror. It feels so in love with movies and horror and carries no shame about being in love with either, so it’s easy for us to be in love with it. Shot center-framed like a Tick Tock…

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, goes the incantation — the words used to summon Beetlejuice, that good old irreverent ghost with the striped suit, comically receding shock of colored hair, and penchant for generally beneficial mischief. You’ve gotta say it three times. So, it makes a lot of sense that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice only repeats it twice, in a movie that formally delivers what you expect but does not do very much that you do not expect — two-thirds of a Beetlejuice (1998)…

In A Different Man, Aaron Schimberg explores body modification and the masks we wear. Threads of autonomy and identity hang perilously in the balance. The fragile line between self-acceptance and societal acceptance begins to blur, as characters change who they are to fit an assumed idea of who others want them to be. A Different Man asks, when we change everything about who we are, can we still retain our sense of autonomy and identity?

When Edward (Sebastian Stan), undergoes…

Rides a very fine line between fedora-wearing homage and rigid modern noir. What allows Rian Johnson to get away with it is what parts he has allowed to be adolescent and what parts are allowed to be hard-boiled.

The mixture of demure teen lingo, “who are you eating with?” with detective-speak that sounds like a mouthful of glass is what puts it over. By coyly paying off the amusing parallel between this teenage search for belonging and to be the…

Watched at my daughter’s school. The parents all huddled in the back and there wasn’t enough room. The kids all sat on the floor and there was popcorn flying everywhere. Inconvenience is the point. The things you’ll do to help your kid see a movie you’ve already seen together several times in a less movie-friendly environment.

Tried to explain to Ezra, her friends, and my girlfriend that this is all based on the wonderful French movie 3615 code Père Noël,…